I recall a study that estimated ~2/3rds of all cancers are due to uncontrollable factors outside of lifestyle choices - genetics, random mutations, etc.
Apparently she worked for years as cabin crew. Cabin crew do get subjected to more mutating cosmic radiation than other people.
Some routes are worse than others of course: the worst are the ones over the North Pole (Europe-Alaska or Europe-Japan/Korea/Beijing) where the Earth's protecting magnetic field is weaker. I've been told that one such flight provides a dosage about equivalent to that of a CT-scan. Imagine doing that every day.
That's me and my experience with testicular cancer. No known causes, no family history, no risk factors other than being a white male. I was even outside the typical age range.
Sometimes life just kicks you in the nuts. Literally in my case :-)
Did you perform monthly self-exams? My doctor gets onto me for not doing them, but everything on those lumpy bastards feels like cancer. I don’t know what I am doing. I suppose if I’d felt a few pair that did have issues, I would know what to look for, but short of going on Craigslist, that’s not going to happen.
Anyhow, I sincerely hope your issue is just an “oh yeah. that happened” that you tell whippersnappers about when in your 80s.
Thank you for the kind words! I'm hopefully on the other side of it now having gone through it about 1.5 years ago. Smack in the middle of the original COVID peak, which made the situation all the more fun. I'm in what they call "careful observation" or "surveillance" now - blood work every 3 months, CT scan every 6. So far, so good!
I did perform the monthly self-exams, and that is how I was lucky to have caught it so early. I had a similar feeling about "how am I going to feel a lump on this thing" for years, but when the time came it was a combination of feeling what I thought was a lump but feeling what I KNEW was a difference.
The trick is in doing the exam enough times to know the lay of the land well. Then it becomes an exercise in detecting a difference, rather than a specific bump.
A decent plan of attack might be to start with your next physical/yearly visit. The doctor should check them out, so take that opportunity to ask any questions or even ask for a walkthrough on how to do it yourself. At that point you know you're "good", so anything you are feeling is just how yours are. Then just practice the exam and build your mental map.
For what it's worth, most of the lumps we think we feel tend to be the epididymis which is at the top and can run down the back of the testicle. Also, the cords can get in the way sometimes. We've got some space down there, take advantage of it to shift things around to get a different angle!
We're on HN, so I hope to pull on technicality and not get _completely_ bashed ;-)
OP mentioned (and I didn't check) that 2/3 of incidents are non-controllable, and not that we can't control 2/3 of causes, that's completely different. I'm going to naïvely assume that it's much harder to have a clean slate (no meat, no pollution etc., healthy lifestyle etc.) than to live in carcinogenic to some degree environment.
As a thought exercise I'm assuming (completely sucked out of the finger) numbers in which 95% of population lives in carcinogenic environment and 5% has a clean slate. 2/3 cases being uncontrolled in such heavily swayed population would pretty much make any control pointless. If I remember correctly there's a method for calculating this, but I long forgot it. For comparison regarding chance perception "casino always wins" relates to a 1-5% house edge on games, and here we're talking about potential 33.3%.
Current knowledge is that human body consist of dozens trillions of cells which regenerate on variable rate (some couple days, some couple years). There's quite a lot of times where chance can go sideways and spawn something you don't want.
Those numbers are completely offtopic and without any base whatsoever (and once again, I didn't verify OPs claims). Spiraled on numbers :)
yes, but much of it may be out of your control. See earlier post on air pollution, likewise water pollution, and add any number of other environmental impacts. Some of which you can mitigate through personal choice, but there is also a case that these are societal problems which need societal/institutional solutions.
Even things that people don't usually associate with cancer have an impact, such as alcohol consumption, medication, oxidative stress caused by diet etc...
